A step forward (or 2501-ish steps) and maybe one back

On Sunday, I started one of the tasks that I’d been putting off (or waiting for someone to find time to help me with): I attached the castor wheels I’d bought for the purpose, to the refurbished commercial-grade cross-trainer that had had to be delivered to my garage as it was too wide for my front door. I’d already taken the hand rails off to bring the width down, and, with considerable effort for mounting the doorstep, I managed to wheel it into my house. After several approaches, I decided that there was no way I could get it through any of the internal doors, and so I took it back out to the garage, and re-attached all the pieces I’d removed for portability.

Then at last I plugged it into the mains, and tried it out. To my relief, it worked! So I did a half-hour workout on it. And perhaps the step back, of giving up on getting it into the house, wasn’t so bad after all, as I get quite hot and sweaty working on it and might have got too hot using it in the house.

My plan is to use it each morning that I don’t cycle before going into work, and this morning I did so for the first time, and it felt good.

So the next two stages are to get into the habit of doing this, and to find a way of attaching my netbook to it, along with the buttons of a re-arranged gamepad, so I can do language flashcards while I exercise. In the longer term, I’d want to attach a small screen to it, and wire it to a cheap Linux system.

It now looks like I may be able to acquire cheaply a second-hand multigym and a small sauna, which could be good use of garage space (as I can’t use it as a garage, because my Land-Rover is too tall to go into it). I might ask the landlord for permission to paint the walls inside the garage; they’re brick, but not the artsy modern brickwork that started to appear in the 80s and 90s.

I also took steps backward, forward, sideways and maybe a few diagonally, on Thursday, when I joined the Cambridge Dancers’ Club for a beginners’ ballroom and latin class. I’m not really a beginner overall, but from what I remember of the club when I was a student, they’ll do a much wider range of dances than I’ve done recently, so I will have largely forgotten some of them; and I’d rather learn them thoroughly and do them well, than join a higher class and make embarrassing mistakes. This time, I’ll aim for some of medal levels (although I don’t know whether I’ll get that far in the first year of it).